1) With .NET 4.0, are we going to see any improvement to close the gap? 2) There seems very little information about this except on Channel 9 or various blogs. Are we going to see more information? 3) Is there a way to get the best of both WWS and .NET in a typical application? For example, use WWS for the web service API for

Here is the reply from Bob (our Product Unit Manager)

WCF and Windows Web Services (WWS) are complementary technologies. WCF is the premier Web Services stack to use when writing managed applications; if you are writing native code and want a SOAP stack then definitely use the WWSAPI. Introducing a native SOAP stack underscores our commitment to interop and WS-*. WWSAPI supports a subset of WS-* and is not as full featured or extensible as WCF. It definitely has a smaller footprint than WCF and it also has higher throughput for the scenarios it supports. This is due to a reduced feature set and implementation in native code. It also interops on the wire with WCF.

The article references does not show WWSAPI to be 10X faster than WCF (as the customer claims); it does show the working set of WWS (native) to be 0.5-1MB compared to 4.5MB for WCF (managed/.NET). Server throughput is also better for WWS than WCF, but as noted above, WCF is already industry leading. The fact that a highly tuned, native, less-feature-rich SOAP stack has higher server throughput on ping-like service is not concerning. The cost of any realistic service will dwarf the infrastructure cost of either WCF or WWS. Put another way, either stack should meet the performance needs of a service and the deciding factor should be whether you require a native or managed solution.

The article does not state that most teams in MS are moving to WWSAPI as the customer notes. What is happening is that those teams which require a native SOAP stack can move to WWSAPI; the majority however are using WCF as they are managed.

Finally, trying to wrap or PInvoke between the two is not recommended. If you are writing managed code use WCF; if you are writing native code use WWSAPI.

This was again something we should have done long time back. I guess it was my laziness combined with utter ignorance of a place like this so close to our home in Bangalore. Dad was even more reluctant for some apparent reason. Anyway Mom and Aditi made us silly men realize what an amazing place Bannerghatta National Park actually is.

This one actually came and stood on a kind of pedestal close to the bus we were all in. Really amazing and beautiful creature.

On the way we go through a bear/lion/tiger reserve and finally come back to the zoo. We got to see a baby hippo at the zoo, which was quite interesting. This shot was when the care taker dumped a whole bunch of leaves right onto the little one.